Book of the week
She Said by Jodie Kantor and Megan Twohey (Bloomsbury $34.99)
Few journalists can claim to have changed the world, but at 2.05pm on Thursday October 5, 2017, Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey did just that, when The New York Times published online the results of a five-month investigation under the headline: ‘‘Harvey Weinstein paid off sexual harassment accusers for decades’’. That story brought down a man who had been one of the most powerful producers in Hollywood since the 80s, triggered the global #MeToo movement, and drew a line in the sand about sexual abuse in the workplace. An hour after it had been published, Weinstein rang and told them: ‘‘I’m already dead. I’m a rolling stone.’’
The article won Kantor and Twohey the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. Their book, She Said: Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story That Helped Ignite a Movement, how they put the pieces together. Writing in the third person, ‘‘Jodi’’ and ‘‘Megan’’ become characters in their drama, the narrative speeding towards the moment when the story that Weinstein can’t stop detonates with shattering force.
She Said is a clear-eyed account of the journalistic endeavour required to tie down a story of such significance. It shows how the producer behind Shakespeare in
Love, Pulp Fiction and The English Patient was protected by powerful lawyers, a culture of complicity and a private intelligence agency, Black Cube, that he paid US$100,000 a month. Moment by moment, it tells of the battle to hold him to account: from the first phone call to actress Rose McGowan, who had tweeted in 2016 that an unnamed studio head had raped her and that his behaviour was ‘‘an open secret in Hollywood/Media’’, to the one with Weinstein and his lawyers right before publication, in which the mogul demanded repeatedly to know if Gwyneth Paltrow was in the piece.
Paltrow wasn’t, but the book reveals she had been a major source. One of She Said’s most striking images is of the actress sending panicked texts to Kantor from the upstairs bathroom of her home, with Weinstein standing in her living room, having arrived early for a party.
And on page after page, there is Weinstein, in his hotel suite, in private meetings with young assistants, executives, actresses, in his bath robe, or naked, pressuring women – for massages, to watch
him shower, to remove their clothes, to consent to oral sex. (Weinstein denies all the allegations and claims all the encounters were consensual.)
The accounts are so similar, and they pile up. As do the settlements, the non-disclosure agreements, the women who feel gagged or scared to speak out.
If anything, the segment that follows is even more compelling. It documents the inner struggle of Silicon Valley psychology professor Christine Blasey Ford over whether to speak out about her claims that, while at high school, she was locked in a room and held down by US Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh while he groped her and tried to remove her clothing. He denied the allegations and is now confirmed associate justice.
She Said illuminates exactly why women who have been abused stay quiet for years, and it captures precisely why other attempts to nail the Weinstein story had foundered. Ironically, the book feels like a Hollywood film in the making, though Kantor and Twohey are the least developed characters. The sense of them as revved-up, unstinting, persuasive yet sensitive reporters, however, is enough.